Plastic Kraal is an imaginary farm created in the legacy of Mothepa’s lineage, the grandmother and great-great-grandmother of the artist, Cow Mash. The farm imagines Black female ownership of ecological wisdom through mythical species of plant and land.
The three-part installation of a greenhouse farm, an aerial view of farmland and cows, and a plant library of multiple plant species. Elements of the farm speak to the complexities of access to land and indigenous knowledge in suburban communities as the artist uses materialistic consumer objects to build her farm.
Cow paints a thin line between the utopia of ownership, legacy, Indigenous knowledge, world-creating and the dystopia of consumerism and capitalism separating people from Indigenous ecological wisdom and sustainability.